There are things that a person should do just because they can.
I tell my university students that their intelligence, hunger for knowledge and professional ambitions brought them to tertiary education. And as not everyone has those qualities, society needs them to give it their best shot. They are society’s future professionals and leaders after all.
They should commit to learning because not everyone can.
We should also move if we can because so many cannot.
Elite Noosa triathlete Alexa Leary suffered life-threatening injuries in July after she clipped the wheel of another cyclist when she was riding at speed.
Her story has inspired a national initiative – Move for Lex. Started by her family, the aim is to encourage people to get out and move for those who can’t.
She is now in a rehabilitation hospital as she works hard to claw back the parts of herself that the accident did not take, but until this week Alexa was in Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. In just a few months, the Move for Lex initiative has raised an incredible $80,000 for the RBWH Foundation.
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It is the same hospital my beautiful daughter-in-law, aged just 30, will be in for many weeks.
Always a gutsy, sporty type, Lucy has endured the most major surgeries imaginable to clear her body of bowel cancer and is deep in the fight of her life via an unthinkably painful, difficult path.
She and my son cling to the threads of their life and hold on for the day they can weave them back together.
They know it will never be the same, but face their future with love and courage. They do know that life is so very precious. Their three-year-old dynamo son reminds them of that.
Learn because you can. Do because you can. Move because you can.
A group of friends and I are moving this weekend, in part because we can and Lex and Lucy cannot. We will swim, ride and run in a triathlon, giving it our very best shots.
We are all mature aged and while we are all active, triathlon was new to us all until this year. But we have become a ragtag posse, encouraging each other and finding joy in the pain of training for something none of us thought we would ever take on.
We are all early risers, so meeting for our 5am weekday bike rides through winter began more often with a comment on the cold than the time.
We know what it is to sweat before dawn, prioritise a long Sunday run or ride over a sleep-in and what it feels like to need a second breakfast by mid-morning at work after a big training session.
We are doing it because we can.
My friend and academic mentor, the late USC Associate Professor Stephen Lamble, shared insight when he was told his cancer was terminal 12 years ago.
“It’s strange to know what you are going to die of and I thought I would have this sudden moment of realisation about why we are here,” he said.
“But while it wasn’t a sudden thing, I do know: the meaning of life is life – living it every day. It’s that simple.”
You can’t un-hear such wisdom.
So live, learn and strive we all must, particularly when we have brains that fire and bodies that move.
Brilliant Anglo-American poet WH Auden said: “You owe it to all of us to get on with what you are good at.”
Or maybe just because you can.
Jane Stephens is a USC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer. The views expressed are her own.
